30th January 2009 Archive

Application and server virtualization software maker Citrix Systems says that business began slow last July, but after putting the brakes on costs, it has reported respectable numbers for its fourth quarter.

Security researchers have identified two critical holes in Novell's GroupWise WebAccess, the web front end for the company's email and employee collaboration package, that allow malicious hackers to steal user messages with ease. All supported versions of the program are vulnerable.

If you just want something small and cheap to do a bit of surfing and email on, a netbook is fine. If you need to actually get some proper work done, though, the cut-down spec often isn't really up to the task - which is where something like the Asus N50Vc comes in.

Like Monty Python's famous dead parrot, the futile Aperi open source storage system management project has fluttered to earth because IBM has removed the funding nail that was keeping it upright. Aperi is now openly dead for all the world to see.

Potential savings don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy downturn

Demand for outsourcing has fallen as global economic troubles hit the outsourcing industry, according to research produced by an outsourcing consultancy. Its advisors expect demand to increase early this year, the company said.

Wacky Jacqui Smith continues to believe her own increasingly insane press releases on ID cards. Yesterday she told the people of Manchester that they might be lucky enough to get their hands on ID cards earlier than the rest of the country.

For a brief moment this week, the focus of electric vehicle development in Britain was Huddersfield town centre and while the location may lack the glamour of Geneva, Monaco or Los Angeles what was on show was not without interest.

You’d probably expect a groundbreaking mobile phone to be developed deep inside Nokia’s HQ or in a military bunker. However, a supposedly super-secure handset described as the world’s first truly hands-free mobile has, in fact, been designed on an industrial estate in Hereford, UK.

Those of you who are old enough to remember when it was all fields round here and have spent years searching for an answer to the Sex Pistols' perennial poser Who Killed Bambi? will be delighted to learn that the question has finally been answered.

American medi-boffins say they have developed a way to kill so-called "superbugs" - deadly infections which can't be cured using antibiotics - by simply shining a certain wavelength of blue light on them. They believe the technique could be used safely on patients infected with MRSA*.

From time to time we ask our analyst friends at Freeform Dynamics to compose a primer on a tech topic du jour. Today, we focus on vulnerability management, a crucial component in every IT security strategy.

As the UK prepares to put in place its shiny new vetting database later this year, analysis of a similar project in France reveals a devastating degree of inaccuracy, leading to real hardship for a very large number of people.

We're fully aware that some of our UK readers have pretty well decided that the average American wears a baseball cap, Harley-Davidson sweatshirt, jeans and cowboy boots and walks the mean streets of the Land of the Free with a hunting rifle while swigging from a bottle of hard liquor.

You know the saying: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Well, Panasonic’s DMC-G1 looks like a digital SLR, has interchangeable lenses like a DSLR – but it isn’t a DLSR. No sir, the G1 ushers in a new generation of cameras designed to blast a hole right through the middle of the so-called hybrid/bridge/superzoom market. So, is the G1 a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a sheep in wolf’s clothing or simply in a class of its own?

Joi Ito has a recipe for a world without DRM - cunningly, it's software that stops you doing stuff you're not allowed to. Simple, yes? In the future world according to Ito, every object on the Internet will have licensing and copyright information attached to it, machine will talk to machine, and machine will overrule you if you're accidentally about to swipe something.

Defenders of correct punctuation should look away now, because Birmingham City Council has voted to drop possessive apostrophes from its street signs, in the process risking a "pedants' revolt' as Middle England rises to combat this latest menace to our beloved mother tongue.

Boris Johnson's outspoken defence of Gary McKinnon in his extradition fight has been criticised by a former security consultant, who complains he was denied such support when he himself was charged with hacking offences.

We're not quite sure what to make of this report in Nigeria's Vanguard, but it appears that police in Ilorin, Kwara State, are holding in custody a chap who tried to steal a Mazda, transformed himself into a sheep and was seized by vigilantes in a swift ovine suppression operation.

Fring, developer of the free cross-network messaging and VoIP client, has added Last.FM to its supported-services list. It'll provide access to streaming music for S60 users who can share their musical tastes with the world via various forms of IM including Twitter.

Dell quietly jacked up its prices at the start of this year, but its account managers are only now filtering that information through to the computer maker’s partners and customers, The Register has learned.

Server, PC and ink maker Hewlett-Packard gets a lot of business from small and medium businesses, and these companies are struggling a bit in the Western economies right now. So HP's Financial Services arm has rolled out a tried and true - but dangerously addictive - tactic to move gear: zero per cent financing.

ISPs greeted Carter with a sigh of relief, LINX head of public affairs told us today. In response to copyright infringement, ISPs will not now need to deploy expensive packet inspection - and won't disconnect users.

Clone mainframe maker T3 Technologies - one of the last few non-IBM alternatives for running Big Blue's mainframe software - says that it doesn't anticipate settling its IBM lawsuits in Europe and in the United States. In other words, it won't pull a Platform Solutions.

Security researchers have unearthed a potentially serious flaw in User Account Control (UAC) features in Windows 7. Microsoft is aware of the issue but is currently unconvinced it needs to make changes to the pre-release code.